On a conjecture of Kim, Kim and Liu

Xinyu Hu, Qizhong Lin

Published 2024-09-06Version 1

In 1969, Erd\H{o}s and S\'{o}s initiated the study of the Ramsey-Tur\'{a}n type problems: Determine the maximum number of edges of an $n$-vertex $K_{p+1}$-free graph without large independent set. Given integers $p, q\ge2$, we say that a graph $G$ is $(K_p,K_q)$-free if there exists a red/blue edge coloring of $G$ such that it contains neither a red $K_p$ nor a blue $K_q$. Fix a function $f( n )$, the Ramsey-Tur\'{a}n number $RT( {n,p,q,f( n ))} $ is the maximum number of edges in an $n$-vertex $(K_p,K_q)$-free graph with independence number at most $f( n )$. For any $\delta>0$, let $\rho (p, q,\delta ) = \mathop {\lim }\limits_{n \to \infty } \frac{RT(n,p, q,\delta n)}{n^2}$. Kim, Kim and Liu (2019) determined the value of $\rho(3,p,\delta)$ for $p=3,4,5$ and sufficiently small $\delta>0$. Moreover, they showed $\rho(3,6,\delta)\ge \frac{5}{12}+\frac{\delta}{2}+2\delta^2$ from a skilful construction and conjectured the equality holds for sufficiently small $\delta>0$. In this paper, we obtain $\rho(3,6,\delta)\le\frac{5}{{12}} + \frac{\delta }{2}+ 2.1025\delta ^2$ for sufficiently small $\delta>0$, which is pretty close to solving the conjecture. The key step of the proof is to establish a stability lemma of the $n$-vertex graph that is $(K_3,K_6)$-free with independence number $\delta n$.